Old, empty mansions evoke feelings of loneliness, isolation and even fear. What used to be happy homes for a large number of people have become empty nests. They fearsome or “haunted” as they are dream homes at the same time. They are thus frequent settings for gothic tales and horror movies.
Such old houses were the settings of two short stories: A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The two short stories are about two women who degenerated into complete breakdown while living isolated in huge, dream mansions.
In A Rose for Emily, the lead character grew up in the house with her strict and wealthy family. Because they are rich, they did not mingle much with the people in the community. After all the family members died, Emily remained in the house alone with only an assistant to help her. She had a boyfriend at one point in her younger years but the boyfriend disappeared. At the end of the story, the community people discovers that Emily had actually killed her boyfriend and had slept beside the cadaver all through the years.
In The YellowEallpaper, the led character was recuperating from an unknown illness and was brought to a large mansion to rest. She stayed in a room with yellow wallpaper that she deplored. The yellow wall paper became a symbol of her feelings of isolation and being trapped in her situation. Through her stay, her illusions got worse. At night, she saw a shadowy figure imprisoned behind the wallpaper design, trying to escape. The woman would be able to get out and creep outside and around the mansion. At the end of their stay in th mansion, she had torn all the wallpaper away, symbolically freeing the woman from the wall. In the end, she had confused the woman to be herself and started creeping and behaving like the woman in the wall.
Although it would seem that old mansions causes mental or nervous breakdowns especially by outsiders, it is not necessarily the case. Old, empty houses can bring about or highlight feelings of isolation. It is this feeling that seems to lead to breakdowns.
In the case of the lead character of A Rose for Emily, it is herself that brought about her own problems. Everything had been the result of her choices and decisions. She chose to live her life her way isolated from the whole community no matter. She mistook loving people as possessing them. So, she committed murder and slept beside the man’s cadaver through the rest of her life. Because she had chosen to isolate herself, the community also chose to avoid if not totally ignore her. Thus, her mental problems and shocking crime was discovered only in the end, after Emily had died.
Similarly, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the old mansion isolated the lead character from the rest of the world. The wallpaper in her room became the symbol of her imprisonment or entrapment in the room. The old mansion—in particular her room—became the key aggravating factor in her mental health. She seems to have suffered a complete nervous breakdown in the end. She had confused reality with her illusions. She, in the end, believed that she was the shadowy figure imprisoned in the wallpaper design. In her mind, she had been released from her imprisonment by tearing off the wall paper and releasing the shadowy figure—herself—from the wall. She had thus begun creeping all over the place as she had imagined the woman in the wall to be doing.
The two short stories show how tragic isolation in large houses could be for people with mental problems.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. A Rose for Emily. University of Virginia, 1930. Web. 10 October 2013. <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html>.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. University of Virginia, 1892. Web. 11 October 2013. <http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=GilYell.sgm&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1>.
